Hammond was one of SNL’s greatest impressionists during his 14-year run with the show, pulling off more than 100 characters, from the lip-biting Bill Clinton to the foul-mouthed Sean Connery. But his Trump was so good, SNL kept him in that role even after he left the cast in 2009. He made his final Trump appearance in 2016. (Taran Killam also briefly held the role.) Then Trump’s candidacy took off, and SNL boss Lorne Michaels decided he wanted a more visceral approach. He tapped Baldwin, a Trump hater whose cartoonish portrayal of the reality-TV star president would go on to earn him an Emmy.
.. For Hammond, the shift was crushing, which he detailed when he spoke to The Post last year. Hammond, who remains SNL’s announcer, says he’s now at peace with keeping his Trump in the past. He had moved to Los Angeles to get away from the constant questions, taping his intros remotely. Now he’s back in New York and has been a regular presence around Studio 8H.
.. Hammond’s relationship with Trump is different from Baldwin’s. He tries to remain decidedly apolitical. There were times, long before the White House, when he visited with Trump in his office, studying his movements and speech patterns. He even had Ivanka Trump’s phone number on his cellphone, only deleting it after he lost the part. Last year, Jim Downey, the legendary former SNL writer, called Hammond’s Trump impression “the gold standard.”
But Michaels, speaking to The Post last year, said that he wasn’t looking for accuracy as Trump’s candidacy began to build.
A Tangerine Wig and a Tightrope Walk: Alec Baldwin as Donald J. Trump
The key to a convincing Mr. Trump, the actor said, are “puffs” — his word for the pregnant pauses in the president-elect’s speech. “I see a guy who seems to pause and dig for the more precise and better language he wants to use, and never finds it,” Mr. Baldwin said
@realDonaldTrump Release your tax returns and I’ll stop. Ha.. His Trump is as much censure as impersonation. He does not write the sketches. He is paid $1,400 for each appearance on the show, he said.
“I’m not interested much by what’s inside him,” he said, but in how he moves and takes up space. Mr. Baldwin then amplifies the gestures, and distills them. An emphatic wave becomes a goofy “wax-on, wax-off” movement, he said, the simple hand motion reducing a candidate to an essence: pitchman.
.. “But I think that now that he is the president, we have an obligation — as we would if it was him or her — to dial it up as much as we can.”
.. It has been suggested that Mr. Baldwin, 58, is uniquely able to portray Mr. Trump — and to rankle him — because of their similarities. In 2011, Mr. Baldwin mulled running for mayor of New York City. They can both appear thin-skinned. Antagonized by paparazzi and feeling harassed by what he says are false accusations that he uttered slurs, Mr. Baldwin has at times publicly denounced the media. On Twitter, he can be pugilistic, notably with Mr. Trump and with his brother Stephen Baldwin, over their divergent political views.
.. He riffed on Mr. Trump’s irascibility and his pronunciation of “China.”
.. Mr. Trump’s win caught the show off guard, Mr. Baldwin said, countering expectations on the show’s set of four years of Ms. McKinnon playing her mildly maniacal Ms. Clinton as president.
Alec Baldwin is a Perfect Donald Trump
Her Clinton projects an almost demonic competence and an undisguised contempt for a public that has consistently underestimated or rejected her. Yet the character is also madly cheerful
.. Beyond capturing the low-hanging Trumpisms, Baldwin conveyed the pathetic smallness of Trump’s cruelty, the pithy meanness with which he attacks anyone who irritates him (be they babies, political opponents, or beauty queens)—a meanness that Trump cannot seem to control.